Since the ancient time, there is a center-less trade route lay across the central part of the world island, connecting all countries of Eurasia. A witness of Alexander's empire, ancient Rome, Persia, Arabia, and the Chinese Tang Dynasty, this trade route entered a glorious era. Countless traders, camels and travelers passed through it, thereby promoting global exchanges of commodities, currencies, gold, silver, silk, technology, religions, and wars. As a diversified historical force, business has the basis of fairness and credibility; it drives economic development and promotes cultural enrichment yet it can also cause various problems. Sometimes different countries in the world support this great passage, though at time they oppose it. Relying on this trade route, some countries became prosperous and developed; when these countries closed their doors, their national strength gradually would decline, and they would eventually perish.
Historian named this trade route "Silk Road". Before the emergence of the passages of Indian and the Pacific Oceans, the Silk Road was the key passage where different civilizations of the world could encounter each other and determined their status of the world. The Silk Road had many important "nodes" that are different states, and beneath them there were multiple branches that formed a network. Therefore, from the overall perspective, the Silk Road was not merely an important trade route, but also a network that covered the world island. This is what we know about the Silk Road.
When the economy reaches a certain stage of development, people will focus more on the psyche. Among the issues related to the psyche, the creation and formation of civilization are rather important. It is a question on how to view and understand the historical and cultural traditions of civilizations around the world. Each society has its own roots and traditions, and how one perceives this is an issue faced by China and other countries. Furthermore, this issue is complicated by overlapping, conflicts and contradictions.
Most of the time, there is eurocentrism in the Western countries, while sinocentrism in China. The key question is, how do civilizations meet and merge? In this process of convergence and fusion an initiative of the state, or is there another important source of influence that we have not paid attention to and recognized?
Our conclusion obviously negates the various "centrisms", and we tend to believe that the Silk Road is "a great center-less network of trade routes". This is because, there have been many different civilizations and countries along the Silk Road since ancient time. Looking for a larger perspective, these civilizations and countries were actually only the sites (or nodes) along the Silk Road, not the so-called "centers" that own the Silk Road. From Persepolis in Iran to Taxila in Pakistan, to the ancient Roman ruins on the Mediterranean coasts, and finally to Chang'an, the ancient capital of China, we can see the traces of the Silk Road that connected the countries around the world.
The sociologist and anthropologist Fei Xiaotong had found that there was a network of dotted lines in non-Chinese areas, that "connect all the ethnic groups in East Asia…and achieved a great unification of the pattern." Such understandings were still related to Fei Xiaotong's studies on Chinese civilization. He believed that the Chinese civilization is a kind of "free entity", which is of course another form of sinocentrism.
Cho-yun Hsu, a modern scholar, has noticed the importance of "roads" for a country. He noticed that there was a "dot-line combination" phenomenon in the development of China's southwestern region since the Han Dynasty, and the formation of this "dot-line combination" phenomenon was the premise of the subsequent entry of government administration and organization into the society. Such combination was known as "dao", or route in ancient China. It could be linked to the stage of development which commerce came first, follow by the immigration, and finally government control.
Recently, the book Silk Road by Peter Frankopan has gradually became influential in China. In fact, after the publication of Frankopan's book, I was among the first to be invited to write book review for him. I found that he has a profound understanding of the Silk Road. He has clearly realized that there were trades, crises, wars caused by the Silk Road, and the Silk Road in turn had tremendous impact and influence on religions, civilizations and history. Through his reassessment of global events, our understanding of the Silk Road has reached a higher level, but in the end, Frankopan failed to integrate the qualitative outcome of the relationship between the Silk Road and the different countries.
Perhaps it can be said that, different counties on the Silk Road assumed that they were the "centers" of the Silk Road yet the huge impact of Silk Road that determined changes in these countries were ignored.
What I want to point out is that the Silk Road is important not only from the historical perspective, but also for the real word, because it has always been in an organic growth with self-adaptiveness. When the Silk Road was blocked by the wars, its network would grow by itself and spread into the oceans of the world, the world's maritime routes were then formed and continued to be relied on and utilized in the international trade.
Therefore, the great voyages and the subsequent maritime trade were just the extension of the Silk Road. The unstoppable force that drove the changes was the trading needs of human beings as well as the pursuit of wealth and survival. Thus, the human need for trade and economy is in fact, the most important driver of civilization.
Redefinition is always the most difficult thing to do in the research field, but it is a meaningful refactoring process that allows us to review the history with a different perspective, which is undoubtedly crucial to our understanding of what is happening in the world today.
In the history of China's civilization development process, there were many negations where a dynasty would negate its previous dynasty; this can be seen from Confucianism being given a prominent position by the imperial court to closed-door isolationist policy. Therefore, the process of Chinese civilization could not be properly explained merely by applying a top-down framework; it is only through getting out of the original historical perspective and framework that one could explain the phenomena in the process of history properly.
Of course, the convergence and fusion of civilizations is a complex cognitive process, so it is difficult to be clearly understood, as well as to be integrated and positioned theoretically. However, it is worth to point out that with the convergence and fusion of civilizations, the role of space becomes increasingly important, because the convergence and fusion of any civilization needs the support of spatial platform.
In fact, the history of the expansion of civilizations and trades, could actually relate to the concept of space. In this process of evolution, the Earth has become very small, and the space is gradually becoming a decisive factor and force of influence in the world. It is for this reason that books like Alfred Thayer Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History and other works have given to the rise of today's U.S.-China trade disputes. These various "centrisms" are meant "to see the world from one perspective"; where the "de-centrism" view is more about understanding "how the world sees oneself."
Final analysis conclusion:
Scholars on geopolitics adept at interpreting data may sometimes be unaware of the existence of a larger historical framework, and the implications of these theories may not be fully understood and exerted. One thing is certain; the Silk Road is an objective existence. Its history spans for thousands of years since ancient times, and it continues playing a significant role today, influencing the changes of the world today and the future.
